In the summer of 1932, Maisie Dobbs's career takes an exciting new turn when she accepts an undercover assignment directed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and the Secret Service, in this eighth novel in the Agatha and Macavity Award–winning series starring the psychologically astute detective (following The Mapping of Love and Death). Posing as a junior lecturer at a private pacifist college in Cambridge, she is to monitor any activities "not in the interests of His Majesty's government"—until the college's controversial founder Greville Liddicote is murdered. As the storm clouds of World War II gather on the horizon, this pivotal chapter in the life of Maisie Dobbs foreshadows new challenges and powerful enemies facing the psychologist and investigator.